Six Years Ago

Six years ago today, I was out with a billionaire -- a "B" as in "boy" -illionaire -- till the wee hours. At one point he leaned over and whispered into my ear, "Kambri, when you live in my world, you can do anything you want."

Indeed, in his world, you can.

At the same time, 1,500 miles away, Dad was stabbing Gloria.

Happy Father's Day

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. --Anne Sexton

I remember Dad as a handsome, impulsive young buck who lived life fast and furiously and was a bundle of fun. If this picture doesn't say it, then I'll give you two examples:

When I was fifteen, Dad took me to the mall to shop for school clothes. He strode confidently through JC Penney’s and started pulling all the tops down off every female mannequin, occasionally tweaking a "breast". The mall police caught up to us, and I had to interpret the awkward conversation between Dad and the rent-a-cops:

“Who cares? They don’t have nipples,” Dad shirked.

“It's not right,” the officers awkwardly retorted, reluctant to have this conversation with a teenage girl and her dad.

Dad would not relent. "They're plastic," He signed, with a sly grin.

The officers resorted to pleading, "Please, just tell him to stop."

"Okay, fine," and we sped through the store out to the car where I laughed at Dad's animated mimicking of the exasperated faces of the security guards.

Then, during my junior year, my high school made it to the State championships for a one act play competition held at the University of Texas in Austin. Afterwards, we waited anxiously in the auditorium for the judges to make their decision.

I was chatting with my friends when suddenly I heard a smattering of gasps and giggles mixed in with familiar guttural noises and high-pitched nonsensical sounds reverberating through the sound system. I looked up saw Dad doing his best gyrating Elvis impersonation into the microphone. A few people rushed the stage and the emcee wrested the microphone from the Dad’s hands. This did not faze him one iota, and he continued to perform more enthusiastically to the crowd. Frustrated, the emcee announced, "If he belongs to you, would you get this monkey off the stage?!?!"

My friend Scott turned to me and queried, "Hey Kambri, isn't that your DAD?!"

My mother scrambled to the stage as Dad was taking his bows. Always the entertainer, Dad had left his lasting impression. Later when I asked him just what the hell was he thinking, he said that since the UT students had just bawdily spoofed all the plays -- a way to keep us occupied while the judges made their decisions -- it couldn't be all that big a deal for him to take the stage for a minute.

As the Chinese proverb states, "One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." And, if there's one lesson Dad taught me, it would be:

It is easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Happy Father's Day to him.

A Petty Officer and a Gentleman

In honor of Fleet Week and Memorial Day, I'm telling a five minute story at the Moth tonight. If they draw my name out of the bag, that is. Here it is:


Moving in to your horse's barn because your trailer got repossessed is what some folks might call a low point. If you're my Deaf pot smoking parents, you might just call it Tuesday. Because, the fact, is we had lived in that one room tin shed before. This time around we had electricity and running water. Despite those luxuries, it was time for a drastic change, so my parents moved us to the big city of Ft. Worth, Texas.

It was there -- when I was 16 -- I met a 23 year old Sailor. The Petty Officer from Akron, Ohio, was shy, tan and muscular and drove a white Trans Am with a fake vent on its hood. Mom said he looked just like JFK, Jr. The movie Top Gun had just been released so when I first saw him covered in grease from working on an F-14 Tomcat I thought my uterus would crawl out of my vagina and snatch him whole and devour him like a hungry Venus flytrap from a Roger Corman flick.

But the movie that really predisposed me to falling for the Petty Officer was An Officer and a Gentleman. At 16, I was already either too bitter or headstrong to think that I, or any woman, needed a Prince Charming to save her but in the final scene when Richard Gere scoops up Debra Winger –- his love literally lifting her up where she belongs out of that factory –- well who hasn't at one time or another want to be rescued from their despair no matter how big or small?

Ft. Worth had not provided the reinvention we expected. In fact, things only got worse. Instead of driving 45 minutes one way to get drunk, now Dad just had to stumble across the street to Bennigan's.

It was the summer before my senior year in high school. Mom was making decent money working 80 hours a week building helicopters. I supplemented our income with a full time job at Malibu Grand Prix and was poised to graduate with summa cum laude honors. So, after 23 years of drunken, stoned mayhem and Dad's blatant adultery, Mom finally filed for divorce.

Dad didn't take the news too well and started stalking us. Mom allowing the Petty Officer sleep over only made Dad angrier. After all, it was Dad who gave me the sage advice on my first date: "Don't fuck. I don't want you pregnant I want you to graduate and go to college." Seeing his "baby girl" get swept up into the arms of an officer and a gentlemen made Dad more possessive than ever.

Being a in the Navy meant the Petty Officer had to go on leave once in a while. This time it was a two week stint on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. His first day away, Dad took the opportunity to break in and slash all of Mom's clothes with a knife. We were pretty rattled by this and needed stress release. That day, Mom asked with a glint in her eye, "Do you want to smoke a joint?"

My mother wants to get me, her high school daughter, stoned?! Are you kidding me?

Umm...YES?!

She whipped out a joint; we got high and then got the bright idea to go to Six Flags. We were dirt ass poor so we counted out all our loose change and found a buy one get one free admission offer on the back of a Dr. Pepper can. We got to Six Flags where a guy walked up and said, "Hey I bought these passes for the week but we're leaving town tonight so can't use them. You want 'em?" Good things happened to stoned people, I guess, because that meant we had money for FOOD! We ate ridiculous amounts of coney dogs, cotton candy and elephant ears and rode every roller coaster twice before coming home and collapsing. It was one of the best days of my life.

The next night my dad broke into the house again. This time he punched dozens of holes in the wall, held us hostage for four hours, strangled her and held a knife to her throat before I was finally able to stop the attack and call 911.

A few days later we were evicted for excessive noise disturbance and a few days after that the Sailor came back from sea. When he did, my uterus didn't devour him instead it smothered him with so much love he had no choice but to marry me.

So, Friday the 13th of January, after a long day of school and rehearsal for my role as "Lady Bracknell" in our senior play The Importance of Being Earnest we loaded into the Dodge Omni and Mom drove us to the courthouse. Mom signed the marriage license granting us legal consent. Basically a permission slip like a field trip to the zoo except with a dowry from the US Government in the form of housing and dependent pay. After a couple of quick "I Dos," a judge declared me a Navy wife. My knock off Richard Gere had saved my Debra Winger ass.

Soon after, Mom went on a much needed vacation. Before she left, she gave me a long hug goodbye then handed me a VHS tape, "Here, you and the Petty Officer can borrow this while I'm gone. I think you'll enjoy it."

My heart leapt when I saw the title. The movie?


Debbie Does Dallas.

Old Habits Die Hard

Yes, it is true, Dad is in jail for 20 years for the attempted murder of his third wife – or girlfriend. I'm not sure since he told me he actually never technically divorced his second wife. But when you're stabbing someone to death, do formal labels really matter?

Lovedaddy.org has garnered me lots of questions readers. Mainly: "Why do you still talk to him?"

Last summer, I was sharing some of this with my mom who asked, “Yeah, why DO you?”

Good question. Valid.

I said, "Well, he has always been a big champion of mine. He taught me how to drive in the Toyota and, even though there was never an ASL interpreter, he watched me in every single one of my school plays. He always told me how smart I was and encouraged me in my studies. Like when I was 15 and was going on my first date with Nick Quivers who is now a Christian rock star – Dad told me 'Don’t Fuck! I don’t want you pregnant. I want you to graduate.'"

He really pushed me to reach for the stars!

Plus, how often do you get to relate to a sociopath in a real human way? Examine up close and personal the nature vs. nurture debate. And since Dad contributed 50% of my DNA, understanding him helps me understand myself. Now I finally know why every now and then I get the overwhelming urge to slice somebody’s fucking throat.

So I try to make light with my mom and say, "And besides, he only TRIED to kill you and Gloria, it’s not like actually killed somebody."

Mom says, "Well … that we know of …"

"Uh, excuse me? What do you mean 'that we know of''?"

She replies, "Well. [SIGH] Do you remember Donna?"

Weird as it may be, I’ve gotten comfortable knowing My Jailed Deaf Dad tried to kill two women but what exactly is Mom insinuating?

Yes, I DO remember Donna.

The summer I turned 13, one of my jobs was working at a Fireworks stand. I didn't know it then but Donna, the woman who owned the stand, was Dad's mistress.

Donna ran a Country & Western night club named Johnny B Daltons. My parents took me there once and some guys in his 40s tried to pick me up which gave Mom and Dad a good chuckle. I was petrified as I sipped my fuzzy navel and played backgammon trying not to make eye contact with the potential pedophile.

Donna also had a cute son named Cash Price. Cash drove a convertible Mercedes and would let me sit on the top of the back seat as he drove with the top down to his other fireworks stands to pick up the day's take.

He really liked the song "Easy Lover" and always blasted it as loud as he could. I had a fleeting thought that maybe he thought of ME as the Easy Lover in the song but dismissed the idea quickly because who would want to be an EASY lover? Besides he was 21 and rich and drove a Mercedes. I was 13 and drove a VW Bug that had a dented roof and missing back windshield from the time my brother flipped it three times when he was high on Quaaludes.

The next summer I worked at the fireworks stand again. By then I wasn’t so innocent. A few months earlier, my mom told me of the Second Coming and that Christ would someday return to Earth. I thought she meant -- like – tomorrow. To make sure I didn’t die a virgin, I had my brother’s friend come take care of matters in the back seat of his Mom’s Buick.

Turns out I was an Easy Lover after all just not savvy enough to sleep with Cash Price. Instead I picked a 17 year old stoner who is now in jail not far from Dad.

This summer I never saw Cash. I spent most of my time holed up in an office that let us use their bathroom prank calling my then ex-friend Tina Yamaguchi. The cops traced the calls and figured out it was me and hauled my ass to the police station. I told them that Tina prank called me a few times first, so turn about was fair play. They pointed out that I called her over 1,000 times in an hour. I had two phones going at once. I was always an over achiever. A couple of days later they told me Tina said I was telling the truth –she had started it-- and her parents weren't going to press charges.

So, yes, I remember Donna and her son and her fireworks stand. What about her?

Well, when your father wanted to be with Donna, they would hang out at her other bar Thirsty’s over on Coon Hollow Road. There was this young bartender that your Dad would flirt with and he would just hover over her and tease her non-stop, you know how he is. Well, they found her dead under a bridge on Hwy 2854. She had been raped and then strangled to death with her pantyhose. I always thought maybe your Dad did it. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know the answer.”

Strangled? Dad’s M.O. is all about the neck…something to do with not being able to talk maybe? And 2854 is the only road he could take to get to our trailer on Boars Head from Coon Hollow Road.

Cash and his mom never asked us back to work their firework stand. All these years I thought it was because of the trouble I caused by prank calling Tina. Turns out it might not have been my fault…maybe it was because Dad might have killed Donna’s bartender.

I don’t know. What I DO know is that for those two years, we had the best 4th of July fireworks display anyone could ever ask for.


*Some names of people and places have been changed to protect the guilty.

Embryonic Selection

My friend, comedian Dan Allen, forwarded me this interesting article by Gaby Hinsliff and Robin McKie published in The Guardian.

"This couple want a deaf child. Should we try to stop them?

From embryo selection to abortion, fertility treatment to stem cell research, medical advances have created a furious ethical debate. Now MPs must decide how far science should be allowed to go."

...continue reading at The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/09/genetics.medicalresearch

Capote Redux

After reading at the Family Hour last night in Ochi's Lounge, I was chatting with Sean McCarthy and Hy Bender about parallel thinking and industry trends. As an example, we talked about Capote coming out shortly before Infamous and how none of us watched the latter because of the tremendous success and riveting portrayal of Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman. To top off, my love of the first was cemented by seeing it at the AMMI with a Q&A with the director. But we had heard about how great Toby Jones' take was. Lo and behold, as I sat on the couch going through hundreds of digital photos to submit with a feature interview of me in an upcoming magazine, Infamous came on. I watched it mainly due to the synchronicity. At first, I wasn't digging Toby but by the end I was wracked with just as much sorrow as when I watched Hoffman's version. The story hits close to home for me, obviously, due to my relationship with My Jailed Deaf Dad and how conflicted I feel about the Dad I know and the Dad who tries* to kill people. It's almost too much to bear.

--Kambri
*And who may have actually killed people.

Radio Clip of the Plug for "Love, Daddy"

Christian was on Elliot in the Morning in DC and plugged my Love, Daddy site. They just posted the audio clip and he made me laugh out loud a few times. Especially when he called my dad the Fonzie of the Deaf community. Here's the clip for you to enjoy. He starts talking about me and my family about mid-way through.